Gotzen Frank, Text and Data Mining

The issue of Text and Data mining was on the European Commission’s agenda right from the start of preparatory work for a new legal EU instrument on copyright in a digital context. In its initial proposal for Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive from 2016 there was an article 3 proposing a mandatory exception for reproductions and extractions made by research organizations in order to carry out text and datamining of works or other subject-matter to which they have lawful access for the purposes of scientific research.

The proposal had been prepared by an expert legal study and was accompanied by an impact assessment.

This initiative came as no surprise because it fitted well into the economic thinking of recent years. The feeling is growing that we are heading towards a Fourth Industrial Revolution, triggered by phenomena like high-speed mobile internet, cloud technology, big data analytics, internet of things, and artificial intelligence.

Against this general background,...